Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Chapter 16 - Dawn
from PART THREE - The Nomad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Published in July 1881, Dawn (or Daybreak) was a Genoa book. Though he had begun the preparatory sketches a year and a half earlier in Riva, and had continued them in Venice and Stresa, the book itself came into being in Genoa: ‘Almost every sentence was thought, was tracked down, among the confusion of rocks near Genoa’. It is the concluding work of Nietzsche's positivist period.
A Book for Slow Readers
As with Human, All-Too-Human, Dawn is once again, clearly, a book that is addressed to ‘free spirits’, potential and actual. It is addressed to a ‘company of thinkers’, to, that is, ‘we adventurers and birds of passage [Wandervögel]’; we who resist current customs and conventions and so are denounced by the mainstream as ‘criminals, free-thinkers, immoral persons’ and ‘put under the ban of outlawry [Vogelfreiheit]’. As in Human, Nietzsche senses the gathering of a movement of life-reform: ‘at the present time…those who do not regard themselves as bound by existing laws and customs are making the first attempts to organise themselves and therewith to create for themselves a right’. This movement he wishes to encourage and guide, even though, with the collapse of the old morality, ‘it may make the coming century a dangerous one in which it will be necessary to carry guns’. At present, he observes, there are in Europe ‘perhaps ten to twenty million people who no longer “believe in God” ’, so they should ‘give a sign to one another’ in order to become an organized ‘power in Europe’.
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- Information
- Friedrich NietzscheA Philosophical Biography, pp. 296 - 315Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010